Seems fine from an micro-accounting perspective, but ultimately decreases economic spending due to lower wages which over time results in less profits for the company. Especially in the retail and discretionary spending markets, like sports and miscellaneous entertainment. Unfortuantely the huge companies that employ a great deal of employees underestimate their value to the economy. They dont think beyond their own numbers and consider that their employees go out, spend money, and drive their business as much as their regular clients do. Follow a dollar though the market and you will find that it makes a round trip right back into the pockets of each person that spent it. You break that cycle and the whole process colapses. Though consider that dollar has to end up somewhere, it doesnt just disappear. Figure that and you've got it made.
The solution is not to drop the money draining products, but to focus and energize those that do. Half of the reason the economy is the way it is right now is because all these lame brain companies cut costs by laying off employees. It seems like the easiest way to save money, but while you decrease administrative costs you increase cost per unit and productivity in most cases. Many of these companies soon find out they need those employees to make money and end up hiring them back, albeit at a lower wages. The solution is not to drop employees/products but to create new products with higher margins and increase production to bring down per unit costs, thus driving up margins. Obviously these things are difficult to calculate with something like YouTube because the residiual benefit is hard to trade. An accounting looking at YouTube would see it as nothing more than a cost center, but there are other factors to consider like brand recognition and cost/benefit.
And if they were claiming that as income, well they be visiting the Enron execs soon. But your right, youtube is a sunk cost for Google and its value is in that it drives revenue in other areas. For example, one might purchase a phone or some third party application because it has access to YouTube. Its a necessary cost of doing business in a competitive market, and it provieds a huge benefit to other areas of their business model.
"The average visitor to YouTube is costing Google between one and two dollars"
I could understand that Google might be losing money on youtube, but the above statement is just absurd. Just because you can devide total cost by number of users doesnt make that number mean anything.
Opinions are like a$$holes, everybody has one, and I am going to share mine with you. How thoughtful of me!:)
I am both a Linux user and a Windows user. At home I use gentoo, though I've used slackware, mandrake (before it became so commercial) and several other flavors. At work, I am a windows administrator simply because it provides me more opportunities for work. So you can say that I am more or less operating system agnostic. Does that qualify me to be critical of both systems? Maybe, but keep in mind this is my opinion.
The problem with linux seems to be a lack of focus. The author of the article seems to dwell on the lack of criticism for Linux. I tend to disagree that there is no criticism, I think linux gets more criticism from "new users" than windows ever did. Most new users of windows don't complain because everything just "seems" to work, they have nothing to complain about. Now as most of the more advanced windows users and linux zealots will so adamantly point out, windows is slow, buggy, proprietary, etc. The general consensus however is that windows works fine for most uses. On the flip side of that coin, a vanilla install of ubuntu, or some other mainstream distro will probably have the same result that windows had with new users, it generally just works. For the more advanced users, Linux is like moving a to a new city; you are forced to re-learn certain things, and will inevitably be forced to "tweak" the system somehow to meet your needs. Most of us are ok with his, and many of us complain, but in the end we just use whatever fits the bill the best. The most advanced of the users, namely the programmers, are the same way but they posses the capacity to change the operating system as they see fit. As a result what the rest of us tend to see is only what the programmers thought was useful.
What point am I trying to make here? Well, Im simply stating the obvious, that the users just use whatever is available to them in whatever form best fits their needs. Occasionally a altruistic programmer will update some mundane end user code, but for the most part most of the tweaking happens on the back end, at least with linux. Windows on the other hand has commercial interests to keep in mind. They know that 80% of their customers are inexperienced users and risk losing market share if they dont cater to their needs. Thus 80% of their efforts go to features that make windows easier to use for the end user, which is inherently going to give Windows an advantage in that market. Open source programmers in general, with the exception of Red Hat programmers and other corporate paid distros, have no such requirement or concern. They tailor their code to their needs for the most part and rarely step outside of the box to understand the concerns of the people using their code. In other words the difference here seems to be the inherent lack of risk in open source programming. Most open source programmers simply dont understand or communicate with a majority of their users because they simply dont have to. In most cases they dont risk losing their career over a disagreement on whether or not they want drag and drop support in their GUI or something. Their excuse is that these things are not important but users have proved time and time again that they are..
This is why windows has been so successful they have figured out what users "expect" they understand that rote learning is not the way to go about creating an operating system. They understand the simple needs of the end user and they cater to those needs. Why? Because their jobs depend on it. How many of the typical computer users are spending their time setting up HTPC boxes to record 3 channels and encode them simultaneously or build a web server to remote control their home automation unit? How many users have a need to schedule cron jobs and create shell scripts to compile source code? Honestly? That is such a small portion of the market, but those seem to be the people that linux caters to. There is absolutely NOTHING wrong with that at all, but if anybody ever expects linux to be successful in the desktop market or ever become more mainstream, these are the kind of criticisms that the linux developers must acknowledge.
What gets me with that comment is the "in light of her age" part. Strip searching a 13 year old is not excessive??? WTF?? Strip searching an adult is not excessive, strip searching a 13 year old is just short child molestation in my opinion.
Agreed. Though technically(and legally) student is in the care of the school while at school, it is important to understand the distiction between this and something like a prison. Just because the student was 13 doesnt mean she doesnt have constitutional rights. I think it would be reasonable to argue a 4th ammendment violiation in this case. Posession of an over the counter medication is NOT by any means probably cause for a strip search. I mean, come on people use some common sense. Now if she was accused of having a kilo of cocaine, and there was sufficient evidence to support that claim, then call the freakin police and have her arrested. By no means whatsoever should she be strip searched on the premises, especially not by school administration.
Though I agree with the sentament your logic is flawed. The top 10% of income earners ($100,000+) pay over 70% of the federal taxes. Asumming by "lower middle class" you are talking about pretty much the bottom 50% of income earners; the lower middle class only pays roughly 4% of the federal taxes. Even if you go a bit further up the scale and say the bottom 75%, you are still only talk about roughly 15% of all federal taxes. So yes this "THEIR" money being wasted.
Do "they" deserve hand outs on in some cases bail outs? No, but they do have every right to complain about how the money is being spent.
The problem with these types of people is not so much their own problem but a management problem. Entrusting too much to any one person is dangerous. Proper project management would componentize the workload and have this "quirky" guy working on one small component at a time, you NEVER trust a guy like this with the entire project. These people have a useful skill, but its up to management to utilize that skill in a manner that is conducive to the goals of the company as a whole. If you (as management) have a guy like this running lose in your office deficating in flower pots, and insulting the women because he thinks he is irreplacable: it is YOUR problem, and your responsibility to keep him in check if you feel he is a valuable asset to the company. If you cant rope this guy back in remember rule number one of IT; there is ALWAYS somebody smarter out there somewhere. If you want a master coder with social skills be prepared to cough up the big bucks, otherwise deal with the smelly garage coder with some common sense as a manager.
I'm not an economist however I tend to agree with you. People like the person to whom you responded seem to think that countries like China are any more or less self sufficient than we are. Which I think is far from the truth. Every society in this day in age depends in some way on other countries, and those that feel otherwise usually end up wallowing in third world slums.
Fact of the matter is, the US is one of the biggest consumer countries in the world. We consume literally a huge percentage of the worlds exports, more so than any other country in the world including china. When the US economy is down the world economy is down. They might not see it as bad or as soon as we do in our own country but if you look at the statistics you will find that this is very much the truth.
The distinction here is that cigarettes are generally smoked through a filter. Though a cigarette may technically have more harmful chemicals than (unmolested) marijuana; generally it is considered more harmful because it is being smoked straight without a filter. In my opinion however, this is not a good argument against legal use of marijuana. As it does not acknowledge that marijuana can be ingested in a much safer manner than tabacco/nicotine through food. Its as though one might esssentially be saying that cigarettes are "ok" simply because you are smoking it through a filter. There really is no good argument in that regard, only a blatant avoidance of the truth though misleading statements.
Its very much like the JVM yes, except think of it from a much lower level. Its like building the JVM into the hardware itself. And allowing each instance of every application and your "GUI" to run in its own little virtualized environment, communicating with each other via a virtual network within your system.
Finally somebody gets it. My previous comments aren't being modded up for some reason. But I'm just glad I'm not the only one here that sees the big picture.
I dont think you're looking at the big picture either. See my comments above about Hypervisor. Actually ill just copy an paste them here so save you the time wading through all the comments...
The point, in my opinion, is not that every machine must be connected to the internet, but that each machine uses the same interconnected "hypervisor" model. A machine can still run interdependently, but running in a virtual environment that can scale infinitely and be "hot swapped" to other machines and devices. Using web based technologies allows all applications and even the entire OS itself to exist anywhere be it on the machine or on the web itself.
Each application exists in its own "hypervisor" which allows it to exist independently of the underlying infrastructure. Which minimizes security risk and maximizes portability.
The long term goal I think is that the hardware itself becomes an operating system simply supporting an virtually infinite number of hypervisors.
The technologies you speak of, already exist. Remote API calls, web services, SOAP, etc. Midori as I understand it will be the layer in which everything will be run on top of the hypervisor itself. It is essentially detaching the software and its dependencies from the hardware itself.
I'm not sure how to explain that any more clear without getting into the technical aspects of the technology. The term "Hypervisor" itself is not some cheesy MS coined marketing cliche. Its an acutal term used to describe a virtual machine environment, in which a process (os, application, or otherwise) can run. Independently of the underlying hardware or actual operating system.
In other words, everything would run in a layer on top of the os and hardware that can move and scale to any device, machine, or location.
And not only that, but each application exists in its own "hypervisor" which allows it to exist independently of the underlying infrastructure. Which minimizes security risk and maximizes portability.
I think you are missing the point. The point, in my opinion, is not that every machine must be connected to the internet, but that each machine uses the same interconnected "hypervisor" model. A machine can still run interdependently, but running in a virtual environment that can scale infinitely and be "hot swapped" to other machines and devices. Using web based technologies allows all applications and even the entire OS itself to exist anywhere be it on the machine or on the web itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems fine from an micro-accounting perspective, but ultimately decreases economic spending due to lower wages which over time results in less profits for the company. Especially in the retail and discretionary spending markets, like sports and miscellaneous entertainment. Unfortuantely the huge companies that employ a great deal of employees underestimate their value to the economy. They dont think beyond their own numbers and consider that their employees go out, spend money, and drive their business as much as their regular clients do. Follow a dollar though the market and you will find that it makes a round trip right back into the pockets of each person that spent it. You break that cycle and the whole process colapses. Though consider that dollar has to end up somewhere, it doesnt just disappear. Figure that and you've got it made.
wow lots of typos in that one haha... increase cost per unit and DECREASE productivity residiual benefit is hard to TRACE.
The solution is not to drop the money draining products, but to focus and energize those that do. Half of the reason the economy is the way it is right now is because all these lame brain companies cut costs by laying off employees. It seems like the easiest way to save money, but while you decrease administrative costs you increase cost per unit and productivity in most cases. Many of these companies soon find out they need those employees to make money and end up hiring them back, albeit at a lower wages. The solution is not to drop employees/products but to create new products with higher margins and increase production to bring down per unit costs, thus driving up margins. Obviously these things are difficult to calculate with something like YouTube because the residiual benefit is hard to trade. An accounting looking at YouTube would see it as nothing more than a cost center, but there are other factors to consider like brand recognition and cost/benefit.
Sounds like a modern version of the Antikythera Mechanism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
And if they were claiming that as income, well they be visiting the Enron execs soon. But your right, youtube is a sunk cost for Google and its value is in that it drives revenue in other areas. For example, one might purchase a phone or some third party application because it has access to YouTube. Its a necessary cost of doing business in a competitive market, and it provieds a huge benefit to other areas of their business model.
Honestly this sounds to me like little more than a underhanded excuse to start charging for the service. Good luck with that.
"The average visitor to YouTube is costing Google between one and two dollars" I could understand that Google might be losing money on youtube, but the above statement is just absurd. Just because you can devide total cost by number of users doesnt make that number mean anything.
Opinions are like a$$holes, everybody has one, and I am going to share mine with you. How thoughtful of me! :)
I am both a Linux user and a Windows user. At home I use gentoo, though I've used slackware, mandrake (before it became so commercial) and several other flavors. At work, I am a windows administrator simply because it provides me more opportunities for work. So you can say that I am more or less operating system agnostic. Does that qualify me to be critical of both systems? Maybe, but keep in mind this is my opinion.
The problem with linux seems to be a lack of focus. The author of the article seems to dwell on the lack of criticism for Linux. I tend to disagree that there is no criticism, I think linux gets more criticism from "new users" than windows ever did. Most new users of windows don't complain because everything just "seems" to work, they have nothing to complain about. Now as most of the more advanced windows users and linux zealots will so adamantly point out, windows is slow, buggy, proprietary, etc. The general consensus however is that windows works fine for most uses. On the flip side of that coin, a vanilla install of ubuntu, or some other mainstream distro will probably have the same result that windows had with new users, it generally just works. For the more advanced users, Linux is like moving a to a new city; you are forced to re-learn certain things, and will inevitably be forced to "tweak" the system somehow to meet your needs. Most of us are ok with his, and many of us complain, but in the end we just use whatever fits the bill the best. The most advanced of the users, namely the programmers, are the same way but they posses the capacity to change the operating system as they see fit. As a result what the rest of us tend to see is only what the programmers thought was useful.
.
What point am I trying to make here? Well, Im simply stating the obvious, that the users just use whatever is available to them in whatever form best fits their needs. Occasionally a altruistic programmer will update some mundane end user code, but for the most part most of the tweaking happens on the back end, at least with linux. Windows on the other hand has commercial interests to keep in mind. They know that 80% of their customers are inexperienced users and risk losing market share if they dont cater to their needs. Thus 80% of their efforts go to features that make windows easier to use for the end user, which is inherently going to give Windows an advantage in that market. Open source programmers in general, with the exception of Red Hat programmers and other corporate paid distros, have no such requirement or concern. They tailor their code to their needs for the most part and rarely step outside of the box to understand the concerns of the people using their code. In other words the difference here seems to be the inherent lack of risk in open source programming. Most open source programmers simply dont understand or communicate with a majority of their users because they simply dont have to. In most cases they dont risk losing their career over a disagreement on whether or not they want drag and drop support in their GUI or something. Their excuse is that these things are not important but users have proved time and time again that they are.
This is why windows has been so successful they have figured out what users "expect" they understand that rote learning is not the way to go about creating an operating system. They understand the simple needs of the end user and they cater to those needs. Why? Because their jobs depend on it. How many of the typical computer users are spending their time setting up HTPC boxes to record 3 channels and encode them simultaneously or build a web server to remote control their home automation unit? How many users have a need to schedule cron jobs and create shell scripts to compile source code? Honestly? That is such a small portion of the market, but those seem to be the people that linux caters to. There is absolutely NOTHING wrong with that at all, but if anybody ever expects linux to be successful in the desktop market or ever become more mainstream, these are the kind of criticisms that the linux developers must acknowledge.
What gets me with that comment is the "in light of her age" part. Strip searching a 13 year old is not excessive??? WTF?? Strip searching an adult is not excessive, strip searching a 13 year old is just short child molestation in my opinion.
Agreed. Though technically(and legally) student is in the care of the school while at school, it is important to understand the distiction between this and something like a prison. Just because the student was 13 doesnt mean she doesnt have constitutional rights. I think it would be reasonable to argue a 4th ammendment violiation in this case. Posession of an over the counter medication is NOT by any means probably cause for a strip search. I mean, come on people use some common sense. Now if she was accused of having a kilo of cocaine, and there was sufficient evidence to support that claim, then call the freakin police and have her arrested. By no means whatsoever should she be strip searched on the premises, especially not by school administration.
Though I agree with the sentament your logic is flawed. The top 10% of income earners ($100,000+) pay over 70% of the federal taxes. Asumming by "lower middle class" you are talking about pretty much the bottom 50% of income earners; the lower middle class only pays roughly 4% of the federal taxes. Even if you go a bit further up the scale and say the bottom 75%, you are still only talk about roughly 15% of all federal taxes. So yes this "THEIR" money being wasted. Do "they" deserve hand outs on in some cases bail outs? No, but they do have every right to complain about how the money is being spent.
The problem with these types of people is not so much their own problem but a management problem. Entrusting too much to any one person is dangerous. Proper project management would componentize the workload and have this "quirky" guy working on one small component at a time, you NEVER trust a guy like this with the entire project. These people have a useful skill, but its up to management to utilize that skill in a manner that is conducive to the goals of the company as a whole. If you (as management) have a guy like this running lose in your office deficating in flower pots, and insulting the women because he thinks he is irreplacable: it is YOUR problem, and your responsibility to keep him in check if you feel he is a valuable asset to the company. If you cant rope this guy back in remember rule number one of IT; there is ALWAYS somebody smarter out there somewhere. If you want a master coder with social skills be prepared to cough up the big bucks, otherwise deal with the smelly garage coder with some common sense as a manager.
Not sure if anybody else noticed this or posted on it already but its now up on the zune.net support site now as well.
The dude may be tech savvy, but his presentation looks like it was written by a 10 year old.
This guy should set up a donations page... I would be excited to support this kind of project. I certainly hope he keeps it up!
I'm not an economist however I tend to agree with you. People like the person to whom you responded seem to think that countries like China are any more or less self sufficient than we are. Which I think is far from the truth. Every society in this day in age depends in some way on other countries, and those that feel otherwise usually end up wallowing in third world slums.
Fact of the matter is, the US is one of the biggest consumer countries in the world. We consume literally a huge percentage of the worlds exports, more so than any other country in the world including china. When the US economy is down the world economy is down. They might not see it as bad or as soon as we do in our own country but if you look at the statistics you will find that this is very much the truth.
The distinction here is that cigarettes are generally smoked through a filter. Though a cigarette may technically have more harmful chemicals than (unmolested) marijuana; generally it is considered more harmful because it is being smoked straight without a filter. In my opinion however, this is not a good argument against legal use of marijuana. As it does not acknowledge that marijuana can be ingested in a much safer manner than tabacco/nicotine through food. Its as though one might esssentially be saying that cigarettes are "ok" simply because you are smoking it through a filter. There really is no good argument in that regard, only a blatant avoidance of the truth though misleading statements.
Its very much like the JVM yes, except think of it from a much lower level. Its like building the JVM into the hardware itself. And allowing each instance of every application and your "GUI" to run in its own little virtualized environment, communicating with each other via a virtual network within your system.
Not even close. Re-read my previous post.
Finally somebody gets it. My previous comments aren't being modded up for some reason. But I'm just glad I'm not the only one here that sees the big picture.
The point, in my opinion, is not that every machine must be connected to the internet, but that each machine uses the same interconnected "hypervisor" model. A machine can still run interdependently, but running in a virtual environment that can scale infinitely and be "hot swapped" to other machines and devices. Using web based technologies allows all applications and even the entire OS itself to exist anywhere be it on the machine or on the web itself. Each application exists in its own "hypervisor" which allows it to exist independently of the underlying infrastructure. Which minimizes security risk and maximizes portability. The long term goal I think is that the hardware itself becomes an operating system simply supporting an virtually infinite number of hypervisors.
The technologies you speak of, already exist. Remote API calls, web services, SOAP, etc. Midori as I understand it will be the layer in which everything will be run on top of the hypervisor itself. It is essentially detaching the software and its dependencies from the hardware itself.
The long term goal I think is that the hardware itself becomes an operating system simply supporting an virtually infinite number of hypervisors.
I'm not sure how to explain that any more clear without getting into the technical aspects of the technology. The term "Hypervisor" itself is not some cheesy MS coined marketing cliche. Its an acutal term used to describe a virtual machine environment, in which a process (os, application, or otherwise) can run. Independently of the underlying hardware or actual operating system.
In other words, everything would run in a layer on top of the os and hardware that can move and scale to any device, machine, or location.
And not only that, but each application exists in its own "hypervisor" which allows it to exist independently of the underlying infrastructure. Which minimizes security risk and maximizes portability.
I think you are missing the point. The point, in my opinion, is not that every machine must be connected to the internet, but that each machine uses the same interconnected "hypervisor" model. A machine can still run interdependently, but running in a virtual environment that can scale infinitely and be "hot swapped" to other machines and devices. Using web based technologies allows all applications and even the entire OS itself to exist anywhere be it on the machine or on the web itself.